Tuesday, September 23, 2014

What’s with all these stories of Western defections to
Islamic radicalism? Well, the answer may be more over here than over there.

News broke recently of two beautiful teenage girls from
Austria, aged 15 and 16, who became burka-wearing recruiters for the terror
group known as ISIS, or the Islamic State. And their journey to radicalism is
not an isolated case. In my own state of
Colorado, a 19-year-old female just pled guilty to trying to join ISIS, too.
And then there are the two young American men who died in Syria fighting for
ISIS.

Why are young 21st-century Westerners converting to a brutal
form of Islam? Why would young people, with seemingly so much to live for,
leave the West for terrorism?

This question came up last month in a panel discussion with
radio hosts Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, as well as Stephen Meyer of the
Discovery Institute and myself. We all agreed that the answer was not the
radicalism of Islam, but the current emptiness of Western materialism.

The idea that matter is all that matters pervades everything
young people see and hear these days. They hear it in science class, from the
new Cosmos television series, and even, and as I added especially, in
advertising and other media messages. Nearly every commercial message tells us
that we’re born to be consumers, that stuff will make us happy and save us from
our misery, and that there’s nothing beyond the immediate gratification of this
world to live for.

As Dennis Prager said that night, “Secular society produces
a lot of bored people . . . Secular society is a curse because ultimately life
is meaningless if there’s no God.” The materialistic salvation sold to us
promises to fill what Pascal called the God-shaped hole in our hearts … with
stuff. But many see the meaningless of secular salvation, and they become
bored; others become angry, even murderous.

Remember Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who killed 13 people
at Columbine High School? They weren’t Muslims. Then there’s T.J. Lane, a
19-year-old serving three life sentences for shooting to death three high
school students in 2012. At his sentencing, in which he taunted his victims’
families with expletives, Lane opened his blue dress shirt to reveal a T-shirt
on which he had scrawled the word “killer.”

We’ve always had young murderers, but the nihilism of today
is different. Writing in Time several years ago, Harvard’s student body
president called it the “Rude Boy” culture. The tough guy of the ‘60s and ‘70s,
he observed, would say, “I’m better than you, I can beat you up”—but the tough
guy today says, “I flip you off; you don’t matter and neither do I.”

And that’s a whole new level of brokenness. That’s the
cultural shift toward nihilism. A few years ago, the rock band Switchfoot hit
the nail on the head when they sang, “We were meant to live for so much more.
But we lost ourselves.”

This sort of empty pop-nihilism, to borrow a term from
Baylor’s Thomas Hibbs, makes even the evil radicalism of extremist Islam look
attractive to some. And parasitic ideologies like these find folks in despair
easy prey.

Might it be that ISIS finds this shallow ground as fertile
soil from which to harvest young souls for its deadly agenda?

Decades ago, even before the Internet and social media took
over so much of our lives, Aldous Huxley warned of the capacity of the media to
exploit “man's almost infinite appetite for distraction.” Could it be that even
ISIS looks attractive to those who, after having their fill, still feel empty
inside?

Wait a minute, you say, that’s just a small minority. Not
every kid flees to ISIS or thinks of murder as a way to meaning. Well, true,
but how many others are living shriveled up lives of perpetual boredom? What
addictions and distractions are they fleeing to in pursuit of meaning and
purpose? How can Christians point our culture to the One we were made for?

Well, the panel discussion I mentioned earlier can start
that discussion. Come to BreakPoint.org to find out how to watch or listen to
my conversation with Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, and Steve Meyer on this and
other topics relating to God and culture.